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LLVM 3.3 To Introduce SLP Vectorizer

05-07-2013, 01:10 AM

Phoronix: LLVM 3.3 To Introduce SLP Vectorizer

One of the prominent features to be introduced with the LLVM 3.3 release this summer is the SLP Vectorizer. Introduced in the LLVM 3.2 release was the LLVM Loop Vectorizer for vectorizing loops while the new SLP Vectorizer is about optimizing straight-line code by merging multiple scalars into vectors.

Well X is pretty much for workstations and Itanium for servers, mainframes and HPC.
I know Oracle and other companies lost commercial interest in Itanium, but have Intel too?

Itanium got a shit reputation because but it was a promising architecture.

It got bad reputation because:
* The processors (and perhaps micro architectures) were bad, this does not mean the instruction set architecture is bad.
* The compilers for IA-64 were bad and didn't output bytecode that were fast.
* Itanium contained x86-compatibility and people whined that Itanium in x86-mode were slower than real x86 processors.

Comment

Well X is pretty much for workstations and Itanium for servers, mainframes and HPC.
I know Oracle and other companies lost commercial interest in Itanium, but have Intel too?

Itanium got a shit reputation because but it was a promising architecture.

It got bad reputation because:
* The processors (and perhaps micro architectures) were bad, this does not mean the instruction set architecture is bad.
* The compilers for IA-64 were bad and didn't output bytecode that were fast.
* Itanium contained x86-compatibility and people whined that Itanium in x86-mode were slower than real x86 processors.

The architecture seems pretty interesting though. EPIC, VLIW.

What I think you're missing here is the reason why the compilers were "bad." EPIC and VLIW architectures demand so much more from the compiler. A good optimizing compiler is already hard to make for x86...now lets ramp up the difficulty much much further with EPIC and VLIW and see what kind of a compiler we can make. EPIC and VLIW, like so many computer science ideas, are great in theory but turn out no so good in practice.

There is most certainly specific interest in IA-64 and it involves also making LLVM/Clang work out-of-the-box on Windows. There is plenty of discussion on the LLVM/Clang dev lists to express the need for this support.

Intel should pony it up. They're getting far more out of using LLVM/Clang than what they'll ever contribute.

Comment

Intel should pony it up. They're getting far more out of using LLVM/Clang than what they'll ever contribute.

Intel just fought a lawsuit to allow them to stop spending money on Itanium. They aren't going to turn around and start throwing money porting a new compiler after all that work to let them stop working on it.